Meta injects AI into Reels ads and creator pairings

Of all the social media platforms poised to benefit from a potential TikTok ban in the U.S., Meta may be the most well-positioned, thanks to its suite of ad tools surrounding Reels.

At its NewFronts presentation to advertisers on Thursday, the tech giant announced more advertising tools for the short-form video offering, many of which are machine learning and AI-powered.

Here’s what’s new:

• Machine learning-powered recommendations in Instagram’s Creator Marketplace allow brands to search for creators by filtering for their own and their audience’s attributes. Advertisers can send campaign briefs to specific creators or make them broadly discoverable. Meta is also testing an AI tool to predict which organic branded content will perform best in paid partnership ads.

• Meta is applying AI-powered Image Expansion to Facebook and Instagram Reels, which is used on Advantage+ creative. Image Expansion, announced in October, automatically resizes the same image to fit different aspect ratios across Feeds and Reels. Meta also rolled out video catalogues with multi-destination product ads on Reels. Early this week, The Verge reported that Meta’s Advantage+ AI tools glitched and rapidly blew through ad budgets.

• Advertisers can now include external links to a product or sale in their Reminder ads on Reels.
   
• On Tuesday, Meta announced that it’s updating Instagram’s algorithm to recommend original posts instead of reposts and is exploring similar changes on Threads. It will also give creators with smaller followings a better chance of going viral, which partially makes TikTok’s algorithm highly valued.